Six Hot Topics in Sports Science

Where will the next breakthroughs come?

I realize that everyone is sick of end-of-old-year and beginning-of-new-year lists, so bear with me here. The following is not a list of sports and exercise science topics that I think are ripe for progress in 2014. Definitely not. Instead, it's a completely time-of-year-agnostic list of topics that I think are currently producing interesting debate in the sports and exercise science world. Yeah, that's it.

Okay, seriously, this list does come from my 2014 look-ahead column in the Globe and Mailthis week. For more details and an explanation of each of the topics, check out the full article. And if you have more suggestions for topics to look out for this year, please share them in the comments section. At the end of the year, I'll circle back to see how the predictions stacked up, as I did in this post last year. (And belated thanks to reader Dan Way, who suggested the genetics idea in the comments section of that previous post!)